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This Is How You Got Trump:

This Is How You Got Trump:
“Dumbledore’s Army” Running Secret CFPB OpsED MORRISSEYPosted at 2:01 pm on December 6, 2017

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What’s the correct spell to create a buried lead? Aparecium mediatus? The New York Times offers this report on the operation of Consumer Protection Financial Bureau (CFPB) under the command of interim director Mick Mulvaney, with the clear intention to sound the alarm on the bureau’s sharp change in direction. Buried deep in the article, however, is the real news — that a group of bureaucrats have decided to hijack the CFPB as much as possible and operate in secret to defy Mulvaney.

Please note the reflection of the maturity of these employees in their choice of self-aggrandizement, too:

Some employees, including a few of the bureau’s top officials, have welcomed their new leader. Others, pointing to Mr. Mulvaney’s earlier hostility toward the agency and its mission, are quietly resisting. One small group calls itself “Dumbledore’s Army,” according to two of the people who were familiar with their discussions. The name is a reference to a secret resistance force in the “Harry Potter” books.

An atmosphere of intense anxiety has taken hold, several employees said. In some cases, conversations between staff that used to take place by phone or text now happen almost exclusively in person or through encrypted messaging apps.
Ahem. This is not the story of a plucky band of teenage wizards fighting against an evil sorcerer from the pages of a children’s novel. It’s the story of a federal agency whose employees appear to be violating the Federal Records Act, bypassing transparency, and undermining the lawful authority of the elected president and his team. Even the CFPB’s general counsel concluded that the president had the authority to appoint Mulvaney to the post, an argument with which a federal court agreed immediately.

Elections have consequences, and among those consequences are the priorities and agendas of new presidential administrations. It was no secret that Republicans planned to change the direction of the CFPB if they won the election; Richard Cordray’s performance as director was an explicit issue raised during the Trump campaign. The GOP also contended that its powers were overbroad and its structure unconstitutional and that its rulings unnecessarily, arbitrarily and unfairly burdened credit businesses.

The DC Court of Appeals agreed on the constitutional point last October, ruling that Cordray should have never been invested with so much personal power in the first place. That case has gone back for an en banc review, but the solution ordered by the original ruling was that the president could treat the CFPB director as any other political appointee that serves at his/her pleasure rather than requiring cause for removal. Cordray resigned before that question got fully resolved and tried setting up his chief of staff as his successor in order to maintain a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.

“Dumbledore’s Army” is attempting the exact same thing — the creation of unelected bureaucrats as their own authority, without any accountability to voters or the people they elect to govern. It’s a palace revolt by self-important functionaries and, based on their choice of appellation, callow functionaries suffering from cases of arrested adolescence as well. They should be embarrassed by this revelation, and the New York Times should have at least offered some insight into how these secret communications and actions might violate the federal law these government employees are supposed to uphold.

It’s now cliché to say “this is how you got Trump,” but … this is precisely the vision of the “swamp” which voters angrily rejected in 2016. This is also how the CFPB got Mulvaney, too, and this little anecdote will go a long way in legitimizing Mulvaney’s attempts to dismantle the CFPB. As long as these kinds of stories keep emerging, we’ll continue to see populists like Trump gain strength from them and use them to take a wrecking ball to federal agencies. Keep waving those wands, wizards — you’re working magic, but just not the kind you think.

CFPB Employees Form Harry Potter Style Resistance To Trump

Employees within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are using encrypted messaging apps to conspire various ways of resisting acting director Mick Mulvaney’s agenda, according to a Tuesday report.

The group calls itself “Dumbledore’s Army,” a reference to a fictional secret cabal of young wizards in the children’s fantasy series “Harry Potter,” The New York Times reported.

“An atmosphere of intense anxiety has taken hold,” employees said, according to TheNYT. “In some cases, conversations between staff that used to take place by phone or text now happen almost exclusively in person or through encrypted messaging apps.”

The Cause of Action Institute, a nonprofit devoted to “public advocacy and legal reform tools to ensure greater transparency in government, protect taxpayer interests and promote economic freedom,” has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records related to information about the use of encrypted messaging apps by CFPB employees.

“CoA Institute’s FOIA seeks all records reflecting the number of CFPB devices on which encrypted messaging applications were installed, internal policy guidelines on the use of such apps, as well as the communications themselves and efforts by CFPB to recover and archive these messages,” the request reads. The FOIA also specifically requests all communications that contain the words “Dumbledore,” “Dumbledore’s Army,” “Snape,” “Voldemort,” and “He-who-shall-not-be-named,” among other records.

This agency is unconstitutional. It was setup without Congress, is independently funded directly from the fed, and is technically not answerable to anyone.
It needs to be either disbanded and totally eliminated, or another legal agency setup and approved by congress. I'm voting for disbanded and totally eliminated.
Anything to make government smaller.

"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself." -DH Lawrence

A consultant who worked with the highly politicized Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) claims the organization funneled a large portion of over $5 billion in collected penalties to "community organizers aligned with Democrats" as part of a giant slush fund, the Post reports.

[The CFPB] Funneled a large portion of the more than $5 billion in penalties collected from defendants to community organizers aligned with Democrats — “a slush fund by another name,” said a consultant who worked with CFPB on its Civil Penalty Fund and requested anonymity.

Created six years ago as the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren and slipped into the Dodd Frank bill before it was passed by Congressional Democrats, the CFPB became one of the most powerful agencies in D.C., with the ability to exercise enormous power over the U.S. economy while its budget remained unencumbered by congressional oversight.

As one Hill writer put it:

The problem is that this agency and its director were set up to be free from the control of the Congress. Congress’s fundamental obligation to oversee and fund such bureaus or agencies is short-circuited when it comes to the CFPB. In structuring it in the manner written by now-Sen. Warren (D-Mass.), the law abrogated the idea of a government by the people, for the people and of the people.

Instead, it established an autocratic and unaccountable power center for people of Warren’s ideological persuasion — those who view our market economy as an enemy that must be managed by a chosen few. The creation of the CFPB as a rogue agency with a dictatorial leader is one of the most significant acts of malfeasance perpetrated on the American constitutional system since the Sedition Acts of 1798.
The reins of the CFPB were handed over to Trump appointee Mick Mulvaney last week following the resignation of Director Richard Cordray, but not before Deputy Director Leandra English's unsuccessful attempt to block Mulvaney's appointment in a complaint filed against Trump and Mulvaley in a DC court.

After a Federal judge ruled that Mulvaney is now acting director of the CFPB - his first order of business was to institute a 30-day freeze on all new hiring and regulations.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, has been a total disaster as run by the previous Administrations pick. Financial Institutions have been devastated and unable to properly serve the public. We will bring it back to life!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2017

Both President Trump and Mick Mulvaney have had strong opinions about the CFPB in the past, with Mulvaney saying “It is a completely unaccountable agency, and I think that’s wrong,” and adding “If the law allowed this place not to exist, I’d sit down with the president to try to make the case that other agencies can do this job well if not more effectively.” Mulvaney also called the agency "a sad, sick joke."

Aside from the $5 billion "slush fund" detailed in the Post, the CFPB has also engaged in the following:

Bounced business owners and industry reps from secret meetings it’s held with Democrat operatives, radical civil-rights activists, trial lawyers and other “community advisers,” according to a report by the House Financial Services Committee.

Retained GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns, for more than $40 million, making the Democrat shop the sole recipient of CFPB’s advertising expenditure, Rubin says.

Met behind closed doors to craft financial regulatory policy with notorious bank shakedown groups who have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money to gin up housing and lending discrimination complaints, which in turn are fed back to CFPB, according to Investor’s Business Daily and Judicial Watch.

Think a database of google's depth, but used solely by the government.

In this context, Mick Mulvaney appears to be the right tool for the President's vow to "put the regulations industry out of business," which he says will lead to higher employment and higher wages.

“If you’re wondering about his commitment to deregulation, don’t,” Mulvaney said in front of a libertarian gathering a few months ago, “because this is one of the things he pounds on again and again and again.”

I felt until recently the best we could hope for was a war of attrition on these .guv clowns. As three retire, we could replace only one or two. Articles like this would make it so much easier to fire the whole lot of them and forget the agencies existed.
We could probably combine 6 or 8 alphabet agencies (3 letter AND 4 letter) into TWO. Drained swampland makes good golf-courses. Let's call it the MAGA Citizen's Course.

The wonder of our time isn’t how angry we are at politics and politicians; it’s how little we’ve done about it. - Fran Porretto
-http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2016/10/a-wholly-rational-hatred.html

Employees within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are using encrypted messaging apps to conspire various ways of resisting acting director Mick Mulvaney’s agenda, according to a Tuesday report.

The group calls itself “Dumbledore’s Army,” a reference to a fictional secret cabal of young wizards in the children’s fantasy series “Harry Potter,” The New York Times reported.

“An atmosphere of intense anxiety has taken hold,” employees said, according to TheNYT. “In some cases, conversations between staff that used to take place by phone or text now happen almost exclusively in person or through encrypted messaging apps.”

The Cause of Action Institute, a nonprofit devoted to “public advocacy and legal reform tools to ensure greater transparency in government, protect taxpayer interests and promote economic freedom,” has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records related to information about the use of encrypted messaging apps by CFPB employees.

“CoA Institute’s FOIA seeks all records reflecting the number of CFPB devices on which encrypted messaging applications were installed, internal policy guidelines on the use of such apps, as well as the communications themselves and efforts by CFPB to recover and archive these messages,” the request reads. The FOIA also specifically requests all communications that contain the words “Dumbledore,” “Dumbledore’s Army,” “Snape,” “Voldemort,” and “He-who-shall-not-be-named,” among other records.

If ANY of them are caught using encrypted communications outside the government system or using approved government encryption to subvert the transmission of data that is meant to be publicly accessible, don't just fire them. Throw the book at them. Throw it THROUGH them, ass-first.

Do a surprise computer and device search of EVERYONE that works there. Anyone caught with any encrypted messaging apps on their computer or device charge them with being in violation of violating the Federal Records Act and MAKE IT STICK! Trump, and his DOJ NEED to STOP playing games with these idiot Obama hold overs that have done nothing but WASTE A YEAR OF THIS ADMINISTRATION! How much longer is this bullshit going to go on? # more years? Into a successive term should he be re elected? which, at the rate he is going, with the back stabbers is highly doubtful. The time to crush these bastards has long arrived and as the 2018 elections approach, should the dumocrats win and take a majority in the House, everyone here damn well knows Trump WILL be history as they will impeach his ass as the first order of business.

Get RID OF THESE TRAITORS, build a ass high fire under Sessions until he starts thinning the herd of holdovers damn quick!

Being unchartered by congress, the President has the authority to dismantle it and funnel whatever funds it has back to the treasury.

Maybe if we get a pre-Christmas shut-down Trump will make some changes during that time. I don't know how or if that would be possible. He shouldn't expect any help from the CONgress critters. IMO the best way to deal with them is to borrow the old phrase "the beatings will continue until the attitudes improve"

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